Whether you have a dog in your life or simply want to learn more about our species’ best friend, join renowned expert Kevin Behan and discover how a dog communicates with its body.

What does a dog need? Love, play, food, shelter? These are important, but what a dog truly needs, says Kevin, is to be part of a team. Everything in a dog’s life is secondary to the dynamic emotional rapport it feels when it’s part of a team. How can you help to make that happen? Communication is essential, and much of the dog’s communicating occurs through its body language.

Join Kevin, the innovative creator of Natural Dog Training, and discover why paying attention to a dog’s body language — its tail set and facial expressions, how it moves, how it deports — can help you relate to each other more closely as teammates. You’ll learn not only from Kevin’s discussions, photos, and videos, but also from watching him interact freely with his dog, providing you with a model for better understanding your own dog or other dogs when you return home.

This workshop is the sequel to Kevin’s workshop “In Touch With Your Dog.” It is not necessary to have participated in that workshop in order to take this one.

Lately there have been dramatic developments in the research on emotion. On one side of this new paradigm is a book by Lisa Barrett entitled “How Emotions Are Made” in which she argues that emotion is not hardwired Ala the classical model to which the likes of Panksepp and Dimasio have profoundly contributed. On the other side are the developments discussed in the article linked below which argues that emotion is a self-regulating type of thermostat based on positive and negative feedback loops which it is argued form the substrate of all emotional experience. These iterative and recursive loops of experience have become the basis of evaluative judgement, the criteria by which emotional values are rendered, as opposed to a high level psychological overview that is the classical view of emotional experience. In this article the primal part of emotion comes first, the complexities of the mind sit upon this template and can only perceive and respond through this template.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4010957/

Gratifyingly, the most profound implications of the new paradigm verifies the immediate-moment theory of Emotion as a virtual force of attraction. However, there are significant and all important distinctions to be highlighted at the same time. While I believe that emotion comes first, and this is virtually what the author here is saying, nevertheless what’s missing in both approaches in the new paradigm is that they see survival and the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain as the base line of well-being, a homeostasis as the base unit of information. And this conceptualization is due to the view that first the individual organism evolves and then the social structure evolved upon this. On a mechanical level this is true to some extent, a chronological view, but once we understand a principle of conductivity (laws of motion, thermodynamics and electromagnetism) as the baseline of information we can see that the complex and the simple are predicated on the same essential of flow, and in order to have flow one must first have a network of interrelated components all operating in conformance to the same laws of nature. In other words, the network in the form of an operating system (principle of conductivity) comes first, and then the individual and its unique and specific range of behaviors manifest the network information into physically embodied social structures. The social software comes first, the structural hardware of sociability follows. In short, the social structure is an expression, a physical manifestation of the basic principles of energy.

I have learned from immediate-moment analysis that a networked-intelligence, i.e. network coherent behavior, is the true baseline of information by which the animal mind adjudges its experience. This is distilled down to the simple mechanics of moving well, a hunger for something inducing the desire to move and which is then moderated by the need to remain upright. (This systems logic is clearly revealed in the intuitive way people speak in their evaluation of an emotional experience. “Let me digest that and see if it feels right.”) All evaluative, self-regulating, feedback driven loops of experience are subordinate to this mandate, a mandate that the most recent advances in Thermodynamics (The Constructal Law) have demonstrated without equivocation to be the basis of evolutionary processes, be it an inanimate or an animate system. What these current approaches miss is that the experience of flow, a principle of conductivity which self-elaborates into complex manifestations of behavior and social structure, is the guiding principle of action, learning and evolution. I think the error these great thinkers are making is trying to understand human emotion without first fully grasping the animal experience. Nonetheless, the paradoxes, inconsistencies and anomalies in the Classic Model of emotion is driving this new wave of research to more closely approximate the immediate-moment manner of experience that is the nature of animal consciousness which is why I’m finding profound correlations in this new way of thinking of emotion.

KTP “While suppressive regulatory strategies abound, it suggests that emotions are better understood as regulating us, providing a service crucial to all semantic language, learning systems, evaluative decision-making, and fundamental to optimal physical, mental, and social health.”

KB: In other words; emotion conveys a systems’ logic in the mind of an emotional being, the individual doesn’t figure out emotion from an individuated point of view.

KTP: “The wisdom of Jeremy Bentham has oft been quoted: “Man has been placed under the governance of two sovereign masters: pleasure and pain.”1

“Despite this insight, philosophers and psychologists remain haunted by the question: What is the biological Junction of emotion? It has been difficult to disentangle emotion from biological drives and physiological responses,2 from motivational appetites and defenses,3 from cognitive appraisals4,5 or moral intuitions6; to make sense of the cultural similarities and differences,7 or to reconcile divergent theories8,9; so difficult, that theorizing about emotion as a functional whole has largely been abandoned. As one critic put it: “My central conclusion is that the general concept of emotion is unlikely to be a useful concept in psychological theory.”10”

KB: An immediate-moment manner of analysis in contrast successfully bypasses this problem and immediately recognizes emotion operating as a system’s wide operating system. It begins with the recognition of emotion (there is only one emotion, a virtual force of attraction generated by the displacement of the hunger/balance continuum of the animal mind) as a functional whole.

KTP: “While emotion is a central component of human health and well-being, traditional approaches to understanding its biological function have been wanting. A dynamic systems model, however, broadly redefines and recasts emotion as a primary sensory system—perhaps the first sensory system to have emerged, serving the ancient autopoietic function of “self-regulation.” Drawing upon molecular biology and revelations from the field of epigenetics, the model suggests that human emotional perceptions provide an ongoing stream of “self-relevant” sensory information concerning optimally adaptive states between the organism and its immediate environment, along with coupled behavioral corrections that honor a universal self-regulatory logic, one still encoded within cellular signaling and immune functions.”

KB: In other words, we have to consider emotion on the architectural level of the body/mind as opposed to a complex psychological construction. Because the human mind can so readily influence emotional experience and can be part of the elaborative process to its more complex expressions (thereby seeming to affirm the construct theory of emotion), human thought process has not been parsed apart from the animal evaluative experience so that time-centric thoughts have remained as essential to emotional experience. While it may be essential to a human beings’ highly nuanced experience of emotion, that doesn’t mean that the high level psychological awareness an individual might have of emotional experience is therefore in any way a fundamental to the experience. I would like to add that the temporally directional arrow of time is incorporated into the thermodynamic nature of change, heat moving toward cool, and that this is the basis of a seemingly time-coherent basis to animal behavior. So it’s not that a sense of Time is necessary, rather it is that a feeling for thermodynamic reality (principle of conductivity) is the basis of an apprehension of Time.

KTP: “The purpose here is to suggest the opposite: That the problem with the traditional approach is that it has been overly specific, narrow, and anthropomorphic. Indeed, emotion theory remains reminiscent of the Sufi tale of the elephant and the blind men,11 with each theorist grasping a portion, but unable to see the phenomenon in its entirety. Yet rather than integration and synthesis, the trend continues of “dissecting the elephant”12 into ever-smaller fragments devoid of coherent biological function. As a result, emotional feelings and behaviors are written off as outdated animal vestiges, “ill-suited to modern exigencies,”13 to be suppressively regulated by one’s conscious rational mind, if not pharmaceutical intervention.”

“It will be argued that our limited ability to suppressively regulate our emotions is because they are actually regulating us, and from a much deeper, wiser, evolutionary evaluative authority.”

KB: Very well put. The human mind has input into the regulatory feedback loops because it has evolved out of these feedback loops. Nevertheless, if a principle of emotional conductivity is not efficiently subscribed to, then an emotional charge is acquired and this then regulates even the highest level of cognitive mind. I understand emotion as a networking faculty that is bigger than the individual and is why an individual cannot ultimately successfully regulate its internal emotional experience by behaving in ways that are not network coherent. The individual achieves integrity through integration with the network.

KTP: “To sketch this ancient function, we must pan much further back in our phylogenetic history, and delve deeper into the biophysical regulatory processes of living systems, tracing the emergent trajectory of the emotional system from its simplest mechanistic roots to its present state of elaborate multi-tiered complexity.”

“To linguistically accommodate the entire functional elephant, we must broadly redefine the category of “emotion” to include “affect” and innate “hedonic” approach/avoid behavior, locating its function in the arena of regulatory signaling and motor control mechanisms. We must specifically focus the inquiry upon feedback loops, recursive, cyclic and reciprocally deterministic, stimulus-response relationships; those that give rise to the earliest forms of “computation”—information processing—in nature; those that inform what will be termed “self-regulated” behavioral agency in organisms as simple as a single-celled bacterium, and those still evident in the cell-signaling cascades that convey identity-relevant information across all levels of organization within complex multicellular organisms—including humans.”

KB: Here is a point of distinction between the immediate-moment understanding of the network as the baseline of information as opposed to the author’s thesis above. Self-regulating homeostasis drive is not the bedrock. Being knocked out of stasis is how the individual organism captures the energy of entropy and reconverts it into Drive energy that is in service to the network, not to the individual’s survival capacity. Obviously the network can’t survive if individuals can’t survive but the integrity/integration function is underwriting the homeostasis impulse.

KTP: “Indeed, building upon these contributions, I propose that emotion can only be envisioned as a unified functional whole when re-conceived as an entire sensory system—a primary somatosensory system that guides biologically adaptive self-regulation. Not a newly evolved or sixth sense but perhaps the first sensory system to have emerged on the evolutionary stage, born of the simple molecular stimulus-response networks that regulate metabolic and genetic activity and crude sensorimotor behavioral control in single-celled organisms. Such primal self-regulatory “sensations” are functionally homologous to, and still manifest within, cell-signaling mechanisms in multicellular organisms that integrate and maintain “the self” at all levels of complexity—rooted as deeply as those that control the navigation and differentiation of pluripotent stem cells into their various tissue environments during embryonic self-development. In other words, while they may have emerged as sensorimotor regulators in the earliest life forms, the same principle mechanisms still constitute the signaling and communication systems, the self-organizing language—the self-regulatory music, if you will—of the human body.”

KB: In other words, there aren’t many emotions, there is but one emotion. And if these deep processes which are integrated energetically into their surroundings are the basis of the self, and are the basis of the mind, then the animal does not make a distinction between what’s going on outside versus what’s going on inside. And therefore it’s sense of its Self would be a construct of its surroundings, a part of its surroundings, not something separate and distinct from its surroundings. When our immune or digestive system recognizes something as not of the self, we experience a profound wave of revulsion, of expulsion. We do not think of it conceptually as not of our self. If it can’t be digested and we can’t remain upright, then it is not of our Self. Concurrently, if an external variable can be ingested and we can remain upright, then it is of our Self.

KTP: “In whatever form of “subjective experience” these original sensations may have yielded, in functional terms they would deliver primal perceptions of time, space and self—an inaugural glimmer of a body-self moving within its not-self surroundings, at some point constituting the “feeling of being”44 or “how it feels to be alive.”45 Hence, in far more complex bodies in motion (mammals, other primates, and humans), each emotional feeling perception still reflects “a wave of bodily disturbance,” or the “bodily affections,”2 or “the feeling of what is happening.”46,47”

KB: “a wave of bodily disturbance” Here she almost says it:.i.e. a wave of motion that displaces the organism from a state of stasis. So the “feeling of what is happening” begins with sensations of displacement, from being knocked out of balance. What she is therefore describing is a force-centric mind as opposed to a form-centric mind. And she’s also describing, since this system is so elemental to the functioning of the mind and it’s the basis of the construct of the Self, is that it is an inside-out perspective as opposed to an outside-in intellectual construct of emotional experience. This will ultimately disprove however the conceptualization of the self as a construct separate and distinct from the surroundings. If an organism has a force-centric mind with an inside-out perspective, then a construct of the Self emerges as a function of the surroundings, a part of the surroundings, not as something apart from the surroundings. And this means that if the surroundings cannot conform to a sense of self then the internal emotional system is knocked out of balance in a way that can’t be reconciled and therefore the organism wants to flee that particular site or set of circumstances, or act on the environment and impose a principle of conductivity to regulate its Self. And again, the arrow of Time consideration is already factored in to the Thermodynamics of emotion so the animal mind could recognize the deterioration of flow and the importing of obstacles into the configuration to remove the brake and improve the flow. It would closely approximate an understanding of a chronological kind of change, but the opposite is true. The cognitive understanding of chronology is possible due to the thermodynamic nature of emotion.

KTP: “Key to our discussion, however, is that from their emergence forward, these informational sensations have contained “felt evaluations,”48,49 the symbolic binary opposites that we experience as pleasure and pain, the feel good/feel bad hedonic valence of emotion. These “positive and negative” binary opposites offer real-time computational representations of the ongoing dynamic orchestration of whole-body coherence, with harmonically resonant and dissonant reverberations ringing forth when environmental perturbations require self-regulatory responses. The current proposal is that the binary hedonic logic within these felt evaluations offers nothing less than a biological value system, informing us of universally optimal and deficit states of balanced being and becoming—a natural value system rooted in the biophysical requirements for life itself.”

KB: Again, whole body coherence would depend not on an internal status report per se, but whether or not the internal affective state of the body is resonant or not with external rates of change. What is missing from this analysis but which is apparent to an immediate-moment manner of analyzing behavior without the projection of concepts or thoughts, is that emotional affective states are the same as energy states, i.e. electrical charge, electrical current, magnetic field, electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, etc.,etc.. Information is not a function of a simple binary pleasure or pain experience, if the individual feels resonant with the surroundings and is thus integrating with the network, then any pain endured in this pursuit is perceived of as a positive if it enables the organism to move well relative to emotionally relevant variables in the surroundings. For example, some people enjoy fighting, the pain is enfolded into the overall feeling of integration with their surroundings. So the base information state is a network value, or we could say a principle of conductivity, not a binary pleasure/pain principle.

KTP: “In short, the goal here is to sketch a new image for the box of the puzzle of emotion, one where emotion takes its rightful place as a sense; one depicting common feeling tones on par with colors, tastes, scents and sounds. One in which feeling perceptions, ranging from rudimentary pleasure and pain, through basic joy and sadness, to complex pride, shame, admiration and envy, serve as sensory signals offering an elegant palate of evaluative information about our adaptive fitness in the immediate environment. Indeed, the proposal is not only that emotion should be reframed as a sensory system, but that emotion should also be acknowledged as the biological grandfather of all the senses, and that its hedonic self-regulatory logic remains encoded within all other senses—a simple logic, yet one so crucial as to have been conserved throughout our entire evolutionary history. Acknowledging how our presently elaborate, cognitively enriched, emotional perceptions still bubble up from their ancient self-regulatory wellspring, offers quite profound implications for the medical community, as well as the social sciences in general. Indeed, it allows the scientific construct of emotion to come full circle, rejoining with the so-called naive realism of immediate human experience, yet offering direct inroads to embodied knowledge, bountiful emotional intelligence, social intuition, and even moral reasoning.”

KB: The above is a beautiful statement of emotion.

KTP: “But however elegant, these subjective manifestations cannot be separated from their objective counterpart, for each emotional sensory perception includes both an informational component and a coupled behavioral response. Indeed, in this new view, emotion is ground zero for all sensorimotor stimulus-response relationships, with the hedonic approach and avoid behavioral pattern—a pattern observable from the single celled ameba to the complex human84—serving as the primary empirical justification and departure point for our new story. A crucial point is that this crude sentience is contingent upon, and would follow from, the deterministic behaviors themselves, or as Marienberg put it: “the becoming aware of the capacity to act while acting.”85 In short, identifying the biological function of emotion requires taking Skinnerian behaviorism to all new reductionist levels—an inquiry into how approach and avoid behaviors emerge from the chemistry of living systems. Yet, when equipped with the lens of feedback control theory, the journey affords a primordial peek into the “black box,” offering a clear and detailed functional explanation of how innate (“unconditioned”) stimuli evoke “affect” itself—something decidedly lacking in emotion theory.9”

KB: How unconditioned stimuli evoke affect is not lacking in immediate-moment interpretation. It springs from thermodynamics itself, preyful aspects absorb emotion, predatory aspects reflect emotion. Furthermore, these two values can be combined along an infinitely variable gradient to render all manner of subtle emotional nuance, and yet still without requiring high level cognitive input to do so.

KTP: “This brief introduction begins with a redefinition of emotion within this broadened context, turning next to its biophysical substrates and underlying feedback dynamics, and identifying the source of what will be termed “the self-regulatory code.”

KB: Again, since there can’t be information without a network, “the self-regulatory code” is primarily tuned to network specifications, not self preservation standards. If an organism maintains the network charge, they survive. If they add to the network charge, they flourish.

KTP: “In short, the sensory informational components of emotion can only be appreciated against the backdrop of the in-forming, trans-forming, stimulus-response dynamics of matter in motion.”

KB: Where have we heard this before? Immediate-Moment analysis. Here author is almost saying explicitly that emotion is energy, energy in motion, working according to the laws of nature, from thermodynamics to electromagnetism to the laws of motion.

KTP: “Feedback, in terms of general function, refers to communication and control mechanisms prevalent in both mechanical and organic systems—those that report upon (inform) and alter (transform) the relationship between a given system and its immediate environment.86 Feedback is cyclic, as it occurs in circular stimulus-response loops where the output of a system is fed back into itself, serving as a stimulus for a subsequent round of output responses (See Figure 1, two systems with and without feedback). In this primary mechanical context, however, the term “self” is synonymous with the system in question, whether it be an atom, a molecule, a cell, an organ system, or an organism interacting with its local “not-self” environment. ”

KB: This is a more explicit statement that the Self is not bounded by the individual, that it can extend to the system at large. My point would be that this is not being followed to its logical conclusion, i.e. the self is a function of the surroundings, not apart from it.

“(As Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen suggested: “If you ask where does information come from and what its meaning is, the answer is: information generates itself in feedback loops.”94)”

KB: This resonates with Imm-Mom concept of Temperament as a Circle (recursive feedback loops, a process of elaboration) by which the perception of change becomes information in the mind of the animal. But I’m being more specific, the feedback from all the subsystems is bracketed by the all important feedback loop, Hunger relative to Balance.

KTP: “For now, emotion as a self-regulatory sense emerges because feedback “happens” across the great chain of being, the “noise”107 of its simple computational dynamics having been harnessed by self-replicating systems, and conserved, honed, and elaborated upon by natural selection. ”

KB: The “noise” becomes information through the Hunger/Balance feedback loop.

KTP: “In fact, such a system (thermodynamic work cycle and cell membrane) has been suggested to predate even natural selection, described as “context dependent actualization of potential,”126 or “self-other organization.”127”

KB: Here it is being acknowledged that principles of energy as organizing factors predate natural selection. Therefore were we to find these same principles faithfully replicated in the behavior of animals, we would have to acknowledge that the basic parameters of behaviors and the behavioral traits and physical features that facilitate these behaviors likewise evolved not by natural selection.

KTP: “In fact, since its initial emergence, the emotional sense has undergone tremendous elaboration by natural selection. Its present structure is an elegant tri-level informational hierarchy—from affect to basic to complex feelings—reflecting the generally “triune” structure of the brain,108 yet with each still playing its own uniquely valuable self-regulatory role. But perhaps most importantly, it shows how affect provides the core “hedonic”109 evaluative message, the fundamental “bad-for-me” or “good-for-me” appraisals that we experience as immediate psychological pain or pleasure. Indeed, identifying emotion as our primal self-regulatory sense, restores our innate tether to biologically determined optimal—perhaps non-negotiable—states of life-giving balance.”

KB: Again, what’s missing from Hedonistic formulation is that what-is-good-for-me or bad-for-me must also reflect a network value; I would restate it as: Adding-energy-to-the-network-is-really-really good-for-me.

KTP: “Indeed, this new story strikes at the heart of an ongoing philosophical debate as to the nature and origins of mind. Perhaps related to the original Cartesian divide, the debate concerns whether mindful “cognition” is an exclusive manifestation of a functional brain or whether it is primarily embodied and embedded in an environmental context (ie, references 148-150).148–150 The emotional sensory model suggests that it is both, but that as the locus of the feedback control function, “branes”—environmentally embedded cellular membranes—came before brains in terms of evolution, and their signaling dynamics delivered the first experience of self in space and time. (In other words, it suggests that emotion preceded “cognition” proper and that “sentio ergo sum”—I feel therefore I am—may have been more biophysically accurate.) As such, the sensory feedback model weds the computational, representational, identity and embodiment approaches to the emergence of mind in the singular concept of primary self-regulatory perception. That, which I am arguing, gave rise to the inaugural evaluations within the emotional sense.”

KB: Yes, emotion preceded cognition but no matter how complex the emotional sense may be, the network implications can never be escaped from any cognitive deliberation. There is no information outside the network value system.

KTP: “While controversy remains over which emotions are basic,296 based upon their temporal (feedback) significance, this model suggests joy, sadness, disgust, fear and anger to be the best contenders for the mantle of universal self-regulatory perceptions. These basic emotions are relatively more hardwired, unfolding over the first 6 months of infant development,297,298 with their common appraisal themes delivering more specific information299 about basic life-giving requirements—“hedonic needs”300—and how to fulfill them in the immediate environment.”

KB: This stands in conflict with Barrett’s thesis of constructed emotion.

KTP: “For instance, the appraisal themes of the four basic negative emotions—loss (sadness), imminent danger (fear), contamination (disgust), and disempowering obstacles to agency or social violations (anger)—move us to either change the immediate environmental circumstances or alter our location, to “fight or take flight.” To which I would add: to make right—a catchall term I offer to categorize any sort of adaptive, creative problemsolving response to emotional distress, born of the self-developmental imperative and the approach mode of behavior. Right, in this context, is also healthy.
Instead of suppression or behavioral avoidance, a Right Response (RR) is one that involves an active, adaptive, rebalancing of the ecologically optimal (biophysically favorable) relational state between the organism and the environment. The RR has been captured in the stress literature as problem-focused coping,303,304 or transformational coping,305 as perhaps the most adaptive way of reducing the psychophysiological arousal tension.306 This happens in one of two ways: It can involve an active adaptation of the immediate external environment, which is essentially creative action or “work,” the way we build social and economic capital307 and the way we accomplish cultural evolution.”

KB: Right action means moving well and remaining upright. And if the Self extends to the surroundings then moving in ways that cause others to move well would also fall under Right action.

KTP: “They are the result of many self-constructing309 repetitions through the feedback cycle, the basic themes having been elaborated upon by language, individual learning experiences, self-identifying concepts, and sociocultural schemata (cognitive structures—knowledge, beliefs, rules, habits, rituals, traditions and in-group norms, obtained from one’s foster environment).”

A smart student who applies themselves at their studies might find themselves at an elite institution of higher learning, Duke University for example. And were they to excel there, they might find themselves studying under the auspices of a world famous scientist, perhaps someone who has discovered a new principle in physics, someone perhaps such as Adrian Bejan discoverer of the Constructal Law. The odds of this latter fortune unfortunately, are rather low since not too many first principles of science are likely to be discovered in one’s lifetime. Now I was a relatively smart student and I went to a good college, not a “Duke” by any means, however I didn’t apply myself as hard as I could have, I wasn’t seeking mastery, learning for the love of learning. I felt like I was there just to complete grades 13 to 16, not to mention avoiding going to Vietnam, and yet, nevertheless last weekend I found myself in a classroom repurposed as a conference room as part of a boutique hotel, being tutored in the Constructal Law by none other than the discoverer of this new found principle of Thermodynamics, Adrian Bejan. It was the rarest of opportunities. Higher education doesn’t get any better. And to top it off, I then presented my application of Constructal Law to my immediate-moment theory of behavior with Adrian sitting a few feet away. It was as if I was presenting a Doctoral Thesis with the world’s most eminent authority on the matter sitting in review. (In this regard I have indeed applied myself wholeheartedly).

I’m grateful to Willem Larsen, our co-presenter, for putting this conference together. (Even got to meet the elusive Garth, an important behind the scenes person.) And although dog behavior is not Adrian’s domain I’m happy to report that he affirmed that I have applied the Constructal law correctly in my construct of the Canine Constructal Mind. Onward!

I believe that for the first time the hard science of Thermodynamics, the nebulous realm of emotion, and the most intimate intricacies of the animal mind (from both a tracking and an immediate-moment perspective) were successfully integrated into one cohesive swarm of ideas. Thermodynamics affects everything, from geo-politics, economics, animal migratory patterns and the specific story recorded in each footfall, anatomical evolution, and finally, to the most inscrutable and intimate workings of the mind.

The conference concluded as Willem sluiced its main ideas into a number of diverse applications for subsets of the group to chew over, subjects ranging from family dynamics, workplace flow, environmentalism and re-connecting with nature. I’m grateful to have been a part of such a grand and ambitious synthesis. I believe the tape of the conference will be made available and I hope many will tune in to this video in order to find themselves at a Duke University first rate lecture courtesy of Adrian Bejan and Willem, the stuff that great Ted talks are made of.

I remain mystified that the field of biology and behaviorism have not realized the profound implications that the Constructal law means for evolution and even the specific architecture upon which the animal mind is organized and dictates what it learns. As Adrian stated unequivocally everything is physics, even biology, an argument I am extending to behavior.

In my final summation I searched for a statement that would encompass the three main themes of our conference,\; Constructal Law, Emotion and the motive to behavior. I believe the following does so:

How can I move and remain upright?

This statement might seem simplistic but it contains complexity, what I call the Present, Past and Future tenses of body language. First of all, to move and remain upright, which is the universal motive underwriting all movement and even moments of inaction, gives us a simple principle of conductivity, energy moving from high pressure to low pressure; behavior in the present tense, the simplest principle of Thermodynamics. Secondly, when movement involves a challenge to remaining upright, in other words the individual is encountering resistance, then an emotional charge is acquired and is stored; Thermodynamics 2nd principle; the law of conservation. Emotion becomes stress. Finally, Stress causes the organism to be attracted to the “negative” so that it can only-get-out-the-way-it-went-in and this means that Objects-of-Resistance are identified by the law of conservation and an internal emotional force is acquired (Stress) that increases the individual’s drive to make contact with that which caused it to internalize Stress. This is the Future Tense, the Constructal Law, importing Objects-of-Resistance into the configuration in order to improve the flow, i.e.convert stress back to emotion, the solid mass (stress) converted back into the fluid current (emotion) and along the way the social structure emerges. Thermodynamics, emotion and behavior are all of one piece, and this falls under the domain of Physics, not biology or behaviorism.

The Connection between Emotion and Hunting Part Twohttp://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27675-monkeys-cosy-alliance-with-wolves-looks-like-domestication.html?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=SOC&utm_campaign=hoot&cmpid=SOC%257CNSNS%257C2015-GLOBAL-hoot#.VXL2Xs7FuRt In this report we learn of wolves and...

In “YDIYM” I postulated that if two beings want the same object they can potentially communicate. And if they want the same object that neither can get on their own, they can potentially connect. Above in the symbiotic relationship that’s evolved between badger and coyote we have an example of the former, a relationship which doesn’t reach the level of the latter.

http://www.ecology.info/badger-coyote.htm

Both coyote and badger can overcome their prey on their own, they don’t need the other to make the kill, but their odds of getting a kill go up considerably if they work together. Neither species modifies its prey-making method, but they modify their hunting style by moving in tandem from site to site. So they don’t actually relate to each other as the article points out. Neither one has any idea of the other’s point of view which should cause the high cognitive approach adherents to question their conclusions from the various dog experiments that they interpret to demonstrate a theory-of-mind capacity. Whereas if they each needed the other to bring down a common prey because it was too large and dangerous for each one singly, then they could evolve to relate to each other and form a truly social connection. Here the connection between badger and coyote is seasonal and doesn’t carry over into non-hunting contexts. A fact that emphasizes how critical hunting is to the evolution of emotion, emotional rapport and the emotional bonds that lead to sociability.

The Connection between Emotion and Hunting Part Twohttp://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27675-monkeys-cosy-alliance-with-wolves-looks-like-domestication.html?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=SOC&utm_campaign=hoot&cmpid=SOC%257CNSNS%257C2015-GLOBAL-hoot#.VXL2Xs7FuRt In this report we learn of wolves and...

Stump A ChumpScientists use the following as an example of reasoning and...

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]]>Sundog asks a good question below that can extend this Stump/Chump immediate-moment problem to a part two.

“What has this chump stumped is why hunting becomes collaborative and the circle of temperament synchronizes to get the moose and why it APPEARS competitive/unsynchronized in the heat pack? I realize as networked consciousness it is not necessarily competitive, but I do wonder what behavior/energy I am putting my thoughts on top of that makes it appear competitive?” Sundog

Yes it does appear as if the males are competing with each other and that the most dominant one prevails. If this is true, then the male must be thinking something like: “I want to breed with that female and I have to whup that other male in order to do so.” Is that his inner dialogue?

So we know that the males have a sexual pressure that is all consuming and they want to find relief from, but the immediate-moment says they are not thinking about that either. To break it down: (1) What effect do female sex hormones have on the male psyche? (2) We see that the female is walking around slowly and frequently stopping, so what could the female be doing otherwise wherein the males would not be fighting over her? (3) What do #1 and #2 have to do with cooperative behavior in the hunt?

The video below of a “heat pack” cruising the streets of LA West, is often cited on various forums as proof that dominance exists as the controlling principle of canine social structure. But what does this video actually demonstrate?

In this study the thermodynamics of how atoms in a material coordinate their spin states so that the same spin sweeps through the entire lattice of atoms like a contagion, is applied to the cooperative behavior of animals.

Researchers are considering that cooperation in animals is remarkably like a phase shift in a lattice of atoms wherein the magnetic spin of one atom causes its neighbor to align until a cascade of such effects sweeps through the entire lattice to create a single, unified magnetic field. In most substances the spin of its atoms are randomly distributed so that they cancel each other out and the material has no net magnetic charge. We could say this is like a group of non-cooperative individuals. Whereas in magnetic materials the spin states of most of its atoms are aligned so that the electromagnetic charge of each atom combines to produce a net magnetic charge. This is likened to a state of cooperation. Also if an external magnetic field is strong enough, this can influence the atoms within a material to align and aggregate their charge as well. In either case the atoms cooperate to produce a single magnetic field that is stronger than any individual atom can manifest on its own.
To translate this magnetic property to the behavior of animals, this model uses game theory as a stand in for aligned spin states. In one game if all individuals kick in their share of a prize, at the end of the game they each realize a greater return than the single share they possess. However an individual could cheat, keep their share and then reap the benefit of those who sacrifice for the greater good. To then mimic the harmonizing action of an external magnetic field, the risk of punishment for gaming the system is introduced and it’s observed that a phase change similar to atoms linking their spin states tends to break out and spread over the population.
Now while science is beginning to understand that the laws of physics are providing better and more foundational answers for the how of complex affiliative behavior such as sociability and cooperation (with Behaviorism notably absent from these advances), unfortunately they don’t have a way of applying the laws directly to the mind of the individual animal itself. So for example when I explain my energetic model of behavior to receptive experts, even when they find my logic compelling they still believe I’m speaking metaphorically. I have to emphasize that I’m not. I’m speaking literally. My argument is that when animals are emotionally energized, they behave exactly as if they are “point” particles of mass that carry an electromagnetic charge, i.e. charged particles of consciousness. I’m not saying they are generating an electromagnetic field between them that can be measured (although their brain heart and bodies are), but rather that the emotional affects which are consuming their bodies and minds are making them feel just as if they are indeed electromagnetically charged: the proof of which can be seen in their behavior and in this approach’s capacity to provide the most parsimonious explanation for said behavior. (It must be noted however that it can only be seen if one doesn’t automatically project one’s thoughts into their heads. Nevertheless the parsimonious explanation stands on its own logical merit.)
So when one understands this energetic logic, one arrives at a different definition of the self. For example, atoms aligning their spin states into a unified magnetic domain have achieved a higher and more stable energy state, that’s the payoff. Therefore were an atom endowed with a sense-of-self, that sense of stability would certainly have something to do with how the Self is constructed in the mind of such an atom. Therefore an atom would not define its Self as separate and distinct from its surroundings. It would predicate its sense-of-Self on the highest and most stable level of integration with its surroundings. Whereas in mainstream science the brain is seen as a self-contained faculty of intelligence, the individual is seen as manifesting a self-contained sense of its Self, the genome a self-contained agency of inheritance, and this is why science must turn to game theory and the psychological rationale of punishment to effect these electromagnetic principles as an influence on behavior. In this approach the thermodynamic logic is abandoned for metaphor. Unfortunately this leads to the oxymoronic conclusion that punishment is essential to cooperation.

However we don’t need to move away from thermodynamics and electromagnetism and to a psychological rationale such as game theory and the cost of punishment because thermodynamics already has the cost of being selfish baked in. This is how it works: if a sense-of-self is a function of its surroundings as proposed above, therefore acting in a way that elicits positive feedback from its surroundings would simultaneously mean raising the conductive value of the surroundings ( i.e. a heightened magnetic field) and this would benefit the entire configuration of affiliates because the stronger the magnetic field, the more energy it can conduct, hence each individual experiences more flow. Therefore, were an individual to fail to integrate at this higher level it would suffer a diminished sense of Self, it would feel incomplete, i.e. electrically charged. In other words it’s the resistance to flow, an electrical phenomenon, that imposes a toll on the individual. So were one to employ a complete thermodynamic approach to the phenomenon of cooperation we find that magnetism and improved conductivity, .e. flow, rather than punishment, is the lynchpin to cooperation, an important distinction.

My Facebook feed is almost 100% curated to provide a stream of dog behavior, interesting science and of special import, heavy construction equipment. At any rate this piece on dog behavior just came over the transom and warrants comment.

Let me put it this way, if one is wondering if their dog loves them, then one might as well be wondering if gravity is going to hold their feet to the ground. The earth loves us, she won’t let go. Even Jeffrey Dahmers’ dog, (if he had one) — or better yet Hitler’s dogs, HAD to love him. Unconditional love is the default setting of the canine mind. If you find yourself wondering, or worse, working at earning your dog’s love, then you’re working too hard. On the other hand what one should be asking is whether or not your dog TRUSTS you. And this is exhibited by whether or not one’s dog is able to give you his Deepest, Darkest, Dankest energy, or, does it give it to someone or something else, otherwise known as a Problem Behavior.

Heart is a Trust Muscle and to earn a dog’s trust you have to exercise this muscle, nothing else matters. Mental stimulation, tons of attention, sleeping on the bed, these don’t exercise the Trust Muscle. Neither for that matter does exercise. To exercise this part of your dog’s body/mind, I suggest the five core exercises: Pushing—Collecting—Barking—Bite/Carry—Rub-a-Dub. These behaviors conduct a dog’s Deepest, Darkest, Dankest energy and bring it to a state of fulfillment. They reset a dog’s mind to the factory’s default setting, Unconditional Love.

In NDT the bite-and-carry is one of the five core exercises, and in fact it might be the most essential. Above we see that Victoria Stilwell is in effect prescribing the bite-and-carry exercise. Interestingly, so called science-based dog training is moving in the direction of the NDT practice and theory (Bradshaw: dogs should always win at tug-of-war, Pankseep’s seek system as basis of bonding, NDT principle of emotional conductivity and myelination, neutering, self-organizing social systems i.e. the “group mind.” etc, etc..) rather than the other way around. However if her theory of desensitization, counter-conditioning, and positive motivation were the keys to a dog’s adaptive nature and healing damaged dogs, then she should have no need to resort to the bite and carry. Now this very well may be an idea she stumbled upon through simple observation, i.e. dogs that like to carry toys in their mouths aren’t generally aggressive, but will this advice sans the NDT model do her followers any good? NO.

In the eighties, it would have, but now, the heart of a problem dog is generally all calloused over with the effects of positive dog training and hyper-socialization. In the eighties if you gave a dog a toy to bite, the behavioral transformation was remarkable because the hump to get the dog over wasn’t as huge as now. But as science-based dog training took over the behavioral marketplace, now if a dog is particularly aggressive, he will not be distracted by a toy that the owner wants him to have because that goes 180 degrees counter to the Canine Catechism (No Bite, No Jump, Leave It, Time Outs, Off, Look-at-Me) he was raised and trained under and which was initiated at an intense level when he was but a young pup. Invariably modern dog owners leave the dog’s prey instinct and the Drive-to-Make-Contact to develop on its own since the science-based school of thought doesn’t recognize the hunt as the organizing principle of the canine mind and denies the existence of Drive altogether. For example, many trainers confuse the Pushing exercise with the “opposition reflex” which “Eileen On Dogs.com” beautifully points out doesn’t even exist.

The Canine Catechism teaches a dog he can’t give his owner his energy. So today, if an owner offers a “problem” dog a toy and he merrily carries it about, then he’s not really a problem dog and whatever little glitch he’s got could have been handled just as easily by BAT work (threshold manipulation) and cookie treating, or just hurrying on by.

So to be clear, indeed it is helpful for a dog to have a toy in its mouth, and it is calming for other dogs as well, like seeing a knife securely stored in its sheath or a gun strapped in its holster as opposed to someone wielding one in hand. These represent two very different energy states (grounded versus ungrounded) and so they elicit two different emotional responses in an observer. When a dog is clear about the tug toy, then other dogs feel how grounded he is.

I expect that the universal complaint she will be hearing from her followers will be that their dogs are not interested in a toy the instant he’s triggered. Then I suspect Victoria’s next step will be back to threshold manipulation and real smelly (i.e. “high value”) cheese treats and the power of the Bite-and-Carry goes out with the bath water. The real solution is to raise the dog’s emotional capacity (which sets the Master Threshold) by getting that puppy frame of mind back to the forefront of the problem dog’s view of the world and to accomplish this, one needs a model and in this regard science-based training is sorely lacking. The vast majority of the time I spend in rehabbing a dog is trying to get him emotionally free enough to bite what I want him to bite and then carry it about. To do this, teaching a dog to Push, Collect, Bark, Rub-a-Dub serves to get the bite back so that the healing can begin.

What does a dog need? Love, play, food, shelter? These are important, but what a dog truly needs, says Kevin, is to be part of a team. Everything in a dog’s life is secondary to the dynamic emotional rapport it feels when it’s part of a team. How can you help to make that happen? Communication is essential, and much of the dog’s communicating occurs through its body language.

Join Kevin, the innovative creator of Natural Dog Training and author of Your Dog Is Your Mirror, and discover why paying attention to a dog’s body language — its tail set and facial expressions, how it moves, how it deports — can help you relate to each other more closely as teammates. You’ll learn not only from Kevin’s discussions, photos, and videos, but also from watching him interact freely with his dog, providing you with a model for better understanding your own dog or other dogs when you return home.

This workshop is the sequel to Kevin’s workshop “In Touch With Your Dog.” It is not necessary to have participated in that workshop in order to take this one.

~

Kevin Behan has been training dogs for 50 years and is recognized as the nation’s foremost expert on the rehabilitation of aggressive and problem dogs. It’s in his blood: His father founded and trained dogs in the K-9 Corps in WWII and was the first American to train dogs for hospitals, police units, and retail stores. Kevin trained his first dog when he was 10 and started his own kennel in 1981. Using unique techniques, he has trained hundreds of police, protection, and border-control dogs, as well as thousands of America’s pets. He has written Natural Dog Training and Your Dog is Your Mirror.

We welcome you and your canine best friend to experience this very special weekend.

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]]> The video linked below returns us to the question as to what is it about the body posture of the play bow that proves inviting and, we can approach this matter by way of a related question: How did the Play Bow evolve?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgVVKoX8eIc&feature=youtu.be

(hopefully the link above will work)

For example, if someone receives a written invitation to attend an event, there are specific words that convey that intent. Furthermore one can trace the evolution of the words and understand the path they’ve taken toward imparting the information. But behaviorists have never specified the exact mechanics of message transfer as they simply assume the play bow to be an invitation to play since play often ensues and which then leads to the additional assumption that it is an intentional act of communication. Meanwhile the second question has been treated as if it’s inconsequential. For example, it would take two individuals, one the transmitter of the signal and one the receiver of the signal, to simultaneously lower their guard so that they can get close and gain access to vulnerable body parts. There isn’t a slow incremental gradual set of steps that leads one to a lowering of defenses, it’s an all or nothing commitment and it must occur as a fully developed signal within two individuals at the same time. If the first volunteer of a play bow is encountering a predatory interactant that doesn’t recognize the signal and has no way to grasp any potential benefit for a peaceful interaction, well then that’s the end of the play bows’ evolutionary trajectory. Roger Abrantes theorizes that the play bow was probably borrowed from a maternal suite of reflexes, but this is simply an informed but otherwise idle conjecture given that it isn’t backed up by a long and solid line of reasoning. And it certainly doesn’t explain how a deer would recognize the maternal-filial communication signals of a canine as in the video below.

In some scientific circles play is purported to be practice for life skills. Meanwhile Bekoff puts forward a more complicated version theorizing that play is a chance for a dog to put itself in a disadvantageous position in order to practice for the unexpected. He says the play bow is a meta signal indicating that the behavior to follow is all in fun giving the playful one a license to practice what would otherwise be construed as aggressive behaviors as well as putting itself in compromising positions without the risk of being injured. However in the video above why is the deer drawn to the dog, is it logical to say that the deer is placing itself into a vulnerable position as practice for being hunted?

As I’ve noted earlier, my argument is like a geometry proof in which a theorem is applied to deduce the properties of a geometric object.Below is a logic stream in which if one thing is true than that which follows is also true.

(1) When stimulated an animal wants to move.

(2) In order to move, an animal must shift its weight.

(3) Unless physical equilibrium is reacquired, the individual is under an emotional strain under which emotional equilibrium cannot be reacquired.

(4) If (1), (2) and (3) are true, then the following are true as well.

(5) An animal doesn’t distinguish between a state of physical or emotional equilibrium because displacement of either requires movement and both are an emotional experience and an imbalance of either causes strain.

(6) This means that a stimulus is a source of force (physical motion + desire to move) that accelerates an individual into motion. We could call this force “emotional momentum.”

(7) Momentum (either physical or emotional as both are synonymous) commits the Mind to a Forward Point that the Body MUST occupy to remain upright and sustain forward motion in order to return to a state of emotional equilibrium and neutralize strain.

(8) The individual autonomically projects a feeling for its body’s center-of-gravity (p-cog) to this Forward Point (e-cog) because the feat of locomotion cannot otherwise happen. This is an act of emotional projection.

(9) Therefore, a stimulus is invested with a Forward Point (e-cog) that the subject’s body must occupy in order to remain upright and sustain forward motion in order to return to a state of emotional equilibrium and neutralize strain.

(10) In order to restore a sense of emotional equilibrium, the Deer finds itself attracted to the dog since it is a stimulus that has impressed upon the deer a quotient of emotional momentum and which compels the act of emotional projection so that it can perceive how to move relative to the dog to reacquire a state of emotional equilibrium and reduce emotional strain.

(11) The deportment of the stimulus’ body reveals to the subject, by way of emotional projection, whether it has access to that Forward Point that correspond’s to the objects’ center-of-gravity.

So the deer is attracted to the dog (and vice versa) and the body posture of the object reveals access to the Forward Point. Note that the deer as it approaches the dog stomps the ground with its forelegs, this is because it is testing the viability of the ground it’s about to cover as it tries to consummate the state of attraction by reclaiming the Forward Point. It’s testing the soundness of the ground because a state of emotional and physical equilibrium are synonymous in the body/mind of an animal. This stomping is on the same behavioral continuum as antelopes and gazelles stotting when they approach lions. The dog is an Obstacle-of-Resistance that invests the deer with emotional momentum, and which thereby calls into question the viability of the ground it is standing on since the deer’s sense of emotional equilibrium (and therefore physical equilibrium) has been challenged by being stimulated. If the deer is able to accelerate the Object-of-Resistance into motion, this will restore within the deer a state of emotional equilibrium since the stimulus is discharging the emotional momentum in the system, which is destabilizing it, and which by way of emotional projection, is a vicarious extension of its own body. The deer finds itself not only attracted to the dog, but fine-tuning its actions in a way that will promote affiliative behavior in the dog because the inverse and reciprocal process is underway within the dog as well since emotion works the same way in all organisms.

Furthermore, in this interaction we can see the evolutionary antecedent of the play bow expressed by the deer in its most undeveloped stage, then being reciprocated by the dog in its most highly evolved expression. We can see a clear developmental continuum between two widely divergent species and how it could evolve without any risk of exposure between interactants since it flows seamlessly from the basic operating system by which all animals make their way and respond to stimuli. The deer and dog can communicate in a meaningful way even though they are of different species since the oldest relationship between organisms is the predator/prey relationship, vastly older than the maternal/offspring relationship that Abrantes is leaning toward. In other words, all relationships (male/female–parent/offspring–peer-to-peer) evolved from the oldest one, the predator/prey dynamic. Architecturally, this can most accurately be discussed as a thermodynamic phenomenon, i.e. energy moving from a warm pole (predator) toward a cooler pole (prey.)

Since the deer is invested with emotional momentum, attributed by the deer to the dog as the source of the force that displaced its sense of emotional equilibrium, and since the dog is reconfiguring its body by amplifying its hind end, thus, the deer feels it can occupy that Forward Point it has painted onto the dog. The dog is absorbing emotional momentum through that particular body position. Paradoxically as it might first appear, the dog is acting prey like and the deer is acting from the predator polarity. (Note that the dog’s play bow is lowering its head which is the predatory aspect of the body form, and accentuating the rump which is the preyful aspect of the body form. At the same time its shoulders are flexed and supple. The forequarters are the body region most responsible for resisting the imposition of an emotional strain. If the dog’s shoulders are soft, therefore that body space around the dog’s physical center-of-gravity feels accessible. The deer feels safe to approach the dog while testing the ground as it proceeds, and we can also see that the young buck wants to butt the dog with its horns just as a dog would want to grip something it’s attracted to with its teeth, again confirming the deer is operating from the Predator Polarity. Meanwhile, by stomping the ground it collapses the state of resistance between them so that the dog’s frame of mind collapses into a new frame of mind, i.e. moving in an orbit about the deer. The deer perceives that its expression of force (going forward and stomping the ground) accelerates the dog into motion and therefore it can control the force that is acting on it. By orbiting the deer, the dog is moving in a coherent way that makes the deer feel empowered, energized because this circular movement reduces emotional strain. We can see a weak state of affiliation emerging for a brief period of time. However since the deer doesn’t have enough emotional capacity to sustain its predatory behavior and be able to flip back and forth to the prey polarity as a dog is so able to do, when the intensity of stimulation gets too high, it fulfills its attraction to the dog by running away and this loosens its shoulders.

I’m currently writing a book on body language so that my model can be applied to the things we see dogs do everyday. In the meantime, and in sort of a crowd-sourcing way to flesh out my argument, I would like to pose the following question to a science-based trainer or a behaviorist. After a dog performs a play bow, play often results and so this seemingly justifies the interpretation of the above position as an invitation to play. On Patricia McConnell’s website is a comprehensive post on the latest thinking on the play bow.

But an obvious question is never asked in these treatments: Why does this particular configuration of the body constitute an invitation to play? What specifically is being conveyed by a hind end held high and a front end being lowered, and with a dog curiously perched on spring loaded forelegs, that indicates as a “meta-signal” that said play-bowing dog intends to play? In other words, what specific information is the the object of a play-bow pulling from this signal so that he can be assured the sender is intending playful consequences?

Meanwhile Coppinger in “How Dogs Work” shows a sheep-killing dog play bowing before a sheep that for some reason won’t run. Bekoff in excoriating fashion has dismissed Coppinger’s argument in the overall, but has conspicuously failed to address this point.

His failure to account for this behavior is all the more curious because mainstream behaviorism has not arrived at a consensus for why there is play in the first place. One would think that in the absence of such a model the intellectually curious would be open to all kinds of possible interpretations. Bekoff may want to dismiss this as an isolated anecdote, but I’m sure there are countless examples of this among the dog owning community and after a few million anecdotes it becomes data. It’s been my experience that if we pay the most attention to the seeming incongruities rather than dismissing them, we are best able to construct a model.

Meanwhile my argument is that the play-bow is not an intentional invitation to join in play and in my model the play-bowing dog about to pounce in play on a playmate, is not inconsistent with a play-bowing dog about to prey pounce on a prey-mate. I would welcome a science based trainer or behaviorist to demonstrate what specifics of a body performing a play-bow represents a conscious intentional signal to join in a round of play so that it is received in the mind of another as a metal-signal for just that. To date I have failed to find an explanation other than the dog looks playful and play often results. But why does the dog look playful, what is it about that posture and demeanor that makes an observer “feel” something?

The best argument I can think of is the Principle of Antithesis by Darwin wherein those equal and opposite muscle patterns from one useful behavior, seem to be employed in other ways and are available simply because they are not in service to the useful behavior. But this doesn’t really address why the play bow looks playful, just that it’s the opposite of being aggressive. So if someone is not being aggressive toward me I should want to play with them? And this also presumes that the play bow is of no service in and of itself, and it also doesn’t explain why a sheep killing dog would play bow before a sheep that won’t run, perhaps it has a service in ways that have not yet been envisioned by the mainstream consensus that strives to read cognition and intention into these signals?